By
Chuck McManis
President of the Home Brew Robotics Club of
Silicon Valley

®

IntroductionLatest Update: December 10, 2002

My name is Chuck
McManis, welcome to my notebook!

I am an engineer by
training (BSEE from USC) but mostly what I do at work is
design very large systems and write software. To keep my
hardware chops relatively useful and because there is nothing
quite so exhilarating as a program crash, especially one that
actually does damage to the computer running it, I dabble in
the robotics hobby. I've been doing this for about 15 years
now and boy have things changed! Robots in 1985 were lucky if
they had a computer on board, usually connected by a flakey wireless link. Today you can put a cheap laptop on a platform
for about $250 that is more powerful than most minicomputers
and some mainframes back in the previous century.

One of the things I
encourage people to do when they begin their journey in
robotics is to keep a notebook. The notebook serves as
journal and knowledge repository for the aspiring roboticist.
My favorite notebooks are the model 43-648 Computation
Notebook printed by Dennison Stationary Products Co. They
have a 4 x 4 graph paper and each page is numbered. Another
good one is the Design and Computation Book by the Laboratory
Notebook Company (form WW-200-100). The Design &
Computation Notebook also has a 4 x 4 quadruled page with
numbers but also had a cover page with a description for the
contents. Remember to leave the first couple of pages blank
and then later use this as an index for pointing forward to
interesting pages.

If you're really lucky, you can order lab
notebooks from the
Eureka Lab Notebook Company. These
are the best notebooks as they are hard cover, already have
the table of contents in the front, and can be customized to your liking. My
favorite is green quadruled pages, embossed with "Robotics", and numbered.
Sweet! (but pricey at $30 each)

Anyway, this then is
an online snapshot of my notebook, and what with the web and
all, should be a good place to store and share information.

Notebook Sections

The online notebook is
divided into several sections that collect different kinds of
things. Mostly circuits, projects, controllers, etc.
Generally I've built everything I write about however errors
do occur in transcription so if you see one please mail me
about it so that I can fix it!

At the bottom of this page is a Bibliography
of books I feel are worth the incredible price that these things go for
these days.

This is where most of the updates
occur, various projects get information added to them, or I add a one
pager describing them. Pretty much there is something new here every week
or so. On this page you will find over a dozen projects that I've
done at least a 1 page write up on. They span the gamut from my widely
read H-bridge project to the mundane Jumpers
project. Be sure to check out the
Gizmo project as well.

I've written up some of my
experiences with FPGAs and in particular the one
from BurchEd and XESS. This
effort slowed down while I was distracted by BattleBots. Fortunately, I'm
getting the boards out of storage so that I can start work on a Soft
Console. The idea being to have a I/O console that can be the front
end for a number of FPGA projects.

You can't build things without tools, and
unfortunately the tools are often the most persnickity of things. This
link takes to you some pages where I've written up my thoughts on the
tools that I like to use.

This section of
the notebook covers interesting circuits that I use a lot
in various robots and other projects. It isn't
comprehensive but the basics are here. (it is also getting the least
attention at the moment!)

Once upon a time the BASIC
Stamp was a neat new controller. I bought several and have used them
in a few robots and I keep one on my bench to generate test signals. I
also got curious about how they stored what they stored and spent some
time decoding the BASIC stamp.

Here is another interesting tidbit, on the
Futaba FP-R113iJ (otherwise known that PCM version of the PCM1024)
generates it's servo signals for all channels at exactly the same start
time. So to measure all three channels, you need only wait for the
starting edge on any one of the channels, and then track the falling edge
of each of the three channels.

You really can't "figure it
out all on your own." That just isn't possible, also there are about
a zillion books on electronics and software and mechanics etc. So I'll try
to keep a list of my favorites here so that you can build a "Mechatronic"
library of your own:

"The
Art of Electronics" 2nd Edition by Horowitz and Hill. This is
truly the Bible for electronics. It starts with a chapter on basic theory
and then moves briskly right into the good stuff. This will be a reference
for you for the rest of your life so don't skimp and get the student guide
too. That way you can check your answers when you do the exercises.

"Power
Electronics" 2nd Edition by Mohan, Undeland, and Robbins.
Published by Wiley. I can't say how important it is to have this book if
you're going to be building H-bridges or other high power robotic
interfaces. This book has it all, chopper drives, FETs, BJTs, how to
figure out thermals, design transformers, etc. I wish I had had it at the start
of my big speed controller project.

"Mobile
Robots: Inspiration to Implementation" by Flynn and Jones.
Published by AK Peters. This is a classic because it tells you exactly how
to go from thinking about something to actually implementing it. There is
a good description of software here and there are good chapters on basic
construction techniques. You'll probably want a Lego Mindstorms or a Rug
Warrior to go with it though to run through the exercises and watch what
they do.

"The
Designers Guide to VHDL" by Peter Ashenden. This is an excellent
reference for VHDL and if you're going to do FPGAs in VHDL then you have
to get this book.

The Logo Story

Because I'm a slow learner, it
has taken me about 8 years to put together a robotics logo that I'm happy
with. Well suffice it to say, this is it! The one true robotics Logo!
Capturing in a single design what it is to be a robotics experimenter,
hobbyist, scientist, and entrepreneur. Programming, Mechanics, and
Electronics all combined around a great idea to form a complete whole.
Yup, that's what it says : Robots.

Roger
Gilbertson and I were tossing around ideas for logos at an HBRC
meeting a long time ago. We wanted something that combined the essence of
robots which is really a triple discipline activity. This even has a name
of sorts, "mechatronics" but that fails to capture the
programming aspect of it. Anyway, I wanted to represent each of the
disciplines used in robots in such a way that you could make it into a
patch, further the patch could be worn in such a way that your
"best" discipline would be on the top, or if you were good in
two disciplines you could wear it with two sharing the top spot. That way
during the "random access" time of the meeting you if you were
looking for help with programming just look for folks with the programming
section on top. Neat huh?

I've sketched out over a dozen
different ideas, flow charts, transistors, etc. Roger has too, some of
them are in his catalog (see page 4 with the icons for hardware,
electronics, software, and dreams). But they didn't seem to jell. Well
Bill Benson, another club member drew something similar on a piece of
paper and it was the missing pieces. Software as ones and zeros is pretty
universal (flow charts are much too dated) and he had a transistor but I
upgraded it to a FET, and of course there's never been any doubt that a
gear would represent mechanics. To that I added the "great idea"
(the light bulb in the middle) the is the center of it all (Roger's
"dream" fills the same sort of space) and voila' a Robotics
Logo.